Sending Out Smoke Signals

Not everyone at a gathering has the same reaction to the sight, or should I say stink, of marijuana. Some will lick their lips in anticipation of being propelled into a delicious psychosocial gavotte. Others will frown or skitter away, fearful they’re about to find out why the word “dude” is sometimes spelled “doood.” Some will simply think, “Midnight Express.”

The etiquette of pot smoking in social settings is largely uncodified. Yet the world needs an Emily Post to hack a pathway through this fuggy thicket, particularly given pot’s increased presence in the mainstream. The recreational use of marijuana is now legal in two states, as is the medicinal use of it in 18 states and the District of Columbia. In 2010, there was the publication of “The Cannabis Closet,” a collection of testimonials from ganja-loving top executives and government employees and responsible parents, all of which had appeared on the writer Andrew Sullivan’s blog. The thicket: it grows ever thicketier.

If there are no children present, is it appropriate for a host to ask guests if they want to get high? Some people think that doing so puts the invited on the spot. “I just keep a decorative bong on a shelf in my living room,” said Rick Steves, who lives in Edmonds, Wash., and is the host of the public television show “Rick Steves’ Europe.” “If someone comments on it, then it opens up the conversation.” Asserting that liquor is better than pot for social lubrication, he added: “It’s rude to break up a party by bringing out the pot. Especially for nonsmokers, it can be awkward. If one spouse smokes and the other doesn’t, it’s like, ‘O.K., we’re not on the same wavelength, party over!’ ”

Other marijuana enthusiasts believe that Mr. Steves’s view regarding the incongruity between a THC-fueled guest and a non-THC-fueled one is overstated. Bill Maher, the host of “Real Time With Bill Maher,” said: “Alcohol is the substance where people feel the most uncomfortable when the other person isn’t also consuming it. I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me, ‘I won’t drink if you don’t.’ ”

Pot smokers and their friends, by contrast, don’t care about an incongruity, Mr. Maher said. “I was at a giant star’s house recently,” he added. “This person said to me after dinner — they knew I smoke — ‘If you want to smoke pot, go on the balcony.’ ” Mr. Maher said that most people who abstain from smoking pot at the gatherings he goes to feel “sheepish” rather than ashamed or nerdy.

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Indeed, encouraging the pot smokers in the room to momentarily absent themselves for their fug-making can bring some peace of mind to others. “My mother is 90 and my mother-in-law is 87,” said Valerie Corral, the executive director and a co-founder of a cannabis dispensary in Santa Cruz, Calif., called the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana. “They don’t mind when we smoke at home because we go into another room.”

Perhaps marijuanaphiles should take a cue from those furtive boarding-school students and prisoners who not only keep the scented candle industry thriving, but who will smoke one hit at a time (to reduce runaway smoke) and who then blow their exhalations into a rolled-up bath towel. When fumes are not contained or carefully directed, trouble can pop up, even among the pot-tolerant.

Shane Kingery, an Atlanta resident who is going to graduate school for graphic design, took his wife to a party at the home of one of his fellow graduate students. Shortly after party guests started blowing pot fumes out onto the balcony where Mr. Kingery and his wife were standing, the Kingerys left the party: because Mr. Kingery is a nurse and his wife works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are sometimes the subjects of random drug testing.

“It seems we gave the impression that we’re anti-weed or too good for that scene, when it’s really just not our bag,” Mr. Kingery said. It was a little awkward because later, while talking to other partygoers, he said, “I felt the need to subtly slip into the conversation why we don’t smoke. When it’s illegal, it’s easy to abstain and say, ‘Well, it’s the law,’ but now that the lines are being blurred, people are having to draw some of their own.”

Despite the drug’s illegality in most of the country, many pot smokers view the boundaries of their pastime to be more porous than ever. Though it’s a nearly universally held belief that pot smoking is inappropriate around children, the issue gets murkier when the young people in question are college age. Mitch Nash, a Lenox, Mass., based art director and a co-founder of the whimsical gift manufacturer Blue Q, said: “A couple of winters ago, we had an intimate Christmas Eve dinner party with some close friends and their college-age kids. After dinner, as we leaned back and relaxed, one of my daughters, who’d graduated that spring and who takes a puff occasionally, said, ‘Dad, a few of us are going outside for a puff,’ and I said, ‘The hell with that, let’s all do that together at the dining table.’ I rolled some joints and passed one clockwise and one counterclockwise. One kid remarked, ‘I’ve been trying to make this happen for years.’ ”

What works at the Nash dining table might not work in your living room; each situation has its own DNA to be decoded. If, at a gathering, there are people opposed to pot smoking, then abstention or special discretion are called for. “You can feel where it’s cool and where it’s not,” Mr. Maher said. “Like anything else, you want to use courtesy and awareness.” The irony is thick: in order to experience the all-at-onceness and monomaniacally thrilling sensory overload of the substance in question, you should first practice goodly amounts of empathy and temperature-gauging. Or be willing to pay the price. My own worst-ever act of bad manners was getting kicked out of boarding school for smoking pot when I was 17. I remember telling the school’s theater teacher, who had cast me as the Artful Dodger in “Oliver” and who would now have to recast the role 10 days before opening.

I found the teacher in his on-campus apartment, painting a still life. When I broke the news, he hurled his paintbrush at the canvas in anger. As the brush’s handle clattered and thumped onto the floor, it sounded like a bird flying into an airplane’s engine. I froze as if shot. And that slight gravitational heave that seemed to shift the air in the room? My heart, breaking.

Henry Alford is a contributing writer to Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That? A Modern Guide to Manners.” Circa Now appears monthly.

A version of this article appears in print on February 24, 2013, on page ST2 of the New York edition with the headline: Sending Out Smoke Signals. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe